The Pact
by geekprincess26
Summary: Thirty years after the civil war, the Targaryens return to the continent they almost shattered, but they are not the greatest peril faced by the Seven Kingdoms of the Septate of Westeros. Other enemies threaten to tear apart the Septate from within, and what King Eddard Stark knows of them could destroy his family as well.


This fic is dedicated to Tumblr user king-queeninthenorth, with many thanks for encouraging me to take my latest Jonsa inspiration and run with it. (The inspiration itself came from Tumblr user janebrkin's lovely gifset at post/156094361453/jonsa-au-modern-royalty.)

Also, I would be remiss as a writer not to acknowledge the following works that have influenced the atmosphere and world-building of my story:

E!'s show "The Royals"

Lori Wick's novel _The Princess_

Netflix's excellent show "The Crown"

The 1995 film adaptation of Shakespeare's _Richard III_ , starring Ian McKellen

The novel _Taliesin_ , by Stephen Lawhead

Two sudden occurrences ruined the golden rose the girl had so patiently been sewing into the hem of her green skirt. The first was the sound of her bedroom door slamming against the gray stone wall. The second was the piercing utterance of her name by the person who had opened it.

"Sansa!"

The girl, startled, pulled her hand up so suddenly that the golden thread snapped. She immediately rounded on the owner of the voice, who at the moment resembled one of Wintertown's street urchins more than she did a princess. At least three stains marred her blue jeans, and half her hair had fallen out of the braids her maid had so painstakingly arranged just that morning.

"What, Arya?" the older girl snapped. "You made me break my thread!"

"Oh. Sorry." Her younger sister gave her an uncharacteristically apologetic look. "I can help you fix it later." Sansa rolled her eyes, but her sister took no notice. "But you should come with me now. I found something beautiful and _sparkling_ – " her gray eyes widened – "on the second bottom floor. You have to come and see it. It's lovely, Sansa!"

Sansa narrowed her eyes. At the tender age of seven, Princess Arya Stark had firmly established her reputation for getting into more mischief than her three royal siblings combined. Therefore, Sansa, who at ten years old had already earned the nickname "Princess Proper" from the same siblings, immediately became suspicious, despite her sister's use of the words "beautiful" and "lovely." She loved pretty dresses and sparkling jewels and stained glass windows as much as Arya loved rolling in the mud and snow and playing at knights with their brothers, Crown Prince Robb and Prince Bran, which made Arya's sudden love of anything sparkling quite unusual. More likely than not, Sansa thought, Arya had somehow managed to get into their mother's wardrobe, or perhaps even one of her jewelry boxes. She fixed her sister with a determined glare.

"Arya Stark," she said sternly, "if you've gotten into Mother's things again – "

The younger girl rolled her eyes. "No, Princess Proper," she replied. Sansa, who was used to hearing the moniker from all three of her siblings, glared even more fiercely.

"I haven't gotten into anything bad, I swear," Arya went on. Before Sansa could reply with a curt, "Don't say 'I swear,' Arya," the younger girl cut her off.

"They don't belong to Mother, or to Father, or Robb, or Bran, or anybody else," she said firmly. "They're in one of the old rooms downstairs. The servants are cleaning all of the rooms tomorrow, so they set up their boards, and nobody is down there."

"That's because nobody's supposed to be down there, Arya," Sansa reminded her. "The servants are doing this year's cleaning of the wing, and nobody is allowed to interrupt them."

Arya rolled her eyes again. "But they're doing it tomorrow, not now," she protested. "Nobody's there, so we won't be bothering anybody." Seeing the frown on her sister's face lighten, she pressed her advantage. "And they're so beautiful, Sansa. You should just _see_ them. You don't even have to touch them – just look at them."

Sansa pursed her lips against her left cheek, forming one of the few less than proper facial expressions of which Ms. Mazin, her deportment mistress, had been trying to break her. A look at the miniature clock perched upon her desk confirmed that her sewing hour had long since passed, and she had already finished all of her homework for the day, so she was free to do as she pleased until dinner. Besides, neither of their parents, King Eddard Stark and Queen Catelyn Tully, nor anybody else for that matter, had expressly forbidden her or her siblings from exploring the castle's unoccupied rooms as long as they were not getting in the way of the servants or anybody else. And perhaps Arya had in fact discovered something beautiful whose image Sansa might want to stitch into one of her scarves or even replicate with the glass beads in the jewelry building kit her brother Robb had just given her for her tenth birthday.

Sansa carefully set down her fabric, tied off the broken thread, and pushed her needle into her direwolf-shaped pincushion. Finally, she rose to join Arya, who was bouncing on her toes.

"All right," she said, "show me. But if the servants come in early, we have to leave. _Promise._ " She gave Arya her severest proper look as she said the last word.

"Fine," replied the younger girl. "I promise."

She turned on her heels abruptly and skipped out of Sansa's quarters. Sansa carefully shut the door and held up the skirt of her favorite blue denim dress so she could run to catch up with her sister.

Hall by staircase, Arya led her to Winterfell Castle's southeast wing, whose bottom two floors were largely used for storage and other utilitarian purposes. Sansa had rarely been there, but Arya, who had discovered more than half the castle's ancient hidden passageways by the age of five, navigated the hallways effortlessly. Finally, she slipped past a partially open door and beckoned Sansa to follow her. Sansa, who had to maneuver herself carefully in order to squeeze between the wall and the very heavy oak door, gasped when she looked up to see her sister perched on top of an enormous chest of drawers in the middle of an enormous rectangular room. The front and sides of the chest were covered with dancing flickers of light in every hue known to humankind, which drew Sansa's eyes upward to find their source. She found it in the form of the enormous copper chandelier that hung almost directly above the chest. Crystals dripped off each of the fixture's elegantly curved arms, and although its candleholders were empty, the enormous windows on two sides of the room admitted enough sunlight to turn the crystals into dazzling prisms that reflected the light into dancing rainbows that covered every surface within their reach.

Sansa gasped again when she saw that the copper chandelier was only one of ten covering the ceiling of what she imagined must once have been a dazzling and magnificent ballroom. A burnished silver chandelier with direwolf heads carved into its top and arms hung in the center of the room; an elegantly curved golden chandelier with rose-shaped candleholders sat to its side. Each fixture's beads were carved into slightly different shapes than those of its neighbors: the direwolf chandelier's crystals were carved into neat squares, the rose chandelier was adorned with teardrop-shaped crystals, and the beads on each of the other eight chandeliers reflected the streaming sunlight in their own unique patterns onto the various dressers and wardrobes crowded into the room. Sansa's hand reached upward in spite of itself; the chandeliers were far too high up for her to touch, but she could not help wishing her mother would order her ten new dresses at once and have the tailors sew a pattern matching one or another of the chandeliers onto each of them. She would have to get her sketchbook and spend a good hour or two in the room with it, and preferably leave Arya behind so that she would not have to listen to her sister calling her a wet blanket the entire time, but even one chandelier dress would be worth all the complaints Arya could possibly produce, especially if she could watch the tailors work and practice replicating the patterns until she could sew them onto her own dresses in the future.

Sansa's reverie was interrupted by a loud tinkling sound and an accompanying shriek of delight from Arya. She snapped her head in the direction of the noises to see that somehow or another, Arya had found a way to climb onto one of the dressers until her hands were grasping a branch of the lowest-hanging chandelier. As Sansa watched in horror, she swung her body up to sit on it, and then flipped downward until she was hanging from it upside down by her knees

"Arya!" screamed Sansa. "You can't touch that! Come down!" She stamped her foot much harder than was ladylike in her dismay, but Arya just laughed and made faces at her.

"Mother and Father never told us not to touch these," she replied, swinging herself upward and using her hands to propel herself onto the top of a dark wooden cabinet with glass doors. "Besides, they look prettier from up close." She leaped off of the cabinet and propelled herself onto one arm of a burnished gold chandelier with antler-shaped candleholders and stag heads carved into its sides.

"You know they wouldn't want us touching these, Arya," snapped Sansa, but without quite as much bluster as she had intended. Certainly the cabinets and dressers looked solid and safe to climb on, and the prospect of standing on top of one just to get a look at the crystals hanging from the rose chandelier became more appealing the longer she looked at them. After all, nobody was using either the furniture or the chandeliers, and her parents had in fact not expressly forbidden her or Arya from touching them, so as long as she was careful not to damage them, she was not actually breaking any rules. Besides, she had to get Arya off the chandeliers somehow, and it seemed more likely that she could do that from the top of one of the dressers than from the floor.

Finally, Sansa took a deep breath, hitched her skirt, and thanked the Maiden that she had worn a pair of shorts underneath her dress. She forced herself to clamber onto a desk and from there to the top of a tall wardrobe glimmering with diamond-shaped sparkles of light from the rose chandelier.

"Arya," she tried again. "You've been up there long enough."

The younger girl, now sitting on top of the direwolf chandelier with her legs hanging between opposite arms, merely laughed and pulled herself down to swing onto a branch of the rose chandelier, just a few feet from Sansa. The fixture, which was wider and more unwieldy than the other chandeliers, lurched wildly. Sansa screamed and launched herself at once onto the branch across from Arya's. The chandelier rocked and spun for several moments before regaining its balance.

"Arya Stark!" Sansa yelled, but Arya giggled and then suddenly swung whooping through the air to the chandelier's blackened iron neighbor. Sansa swung from arm to arm of her golden perch before she finally managed to grasp one of the roses carved into the center and somehow swing her legs to grip the arms to either side, as Arya had done on the direwolf chandelier. Once she had secured her hold, she forced herself to look downward.

Arya had been right: the crystals, which had looked from the floor so like jewels from one of the fairy tales of which Sansa was so fond, now mesmerized her completely. Despite herself, she reached downward and gently touched one of them. The bead swung and spun, and so did the light it reflected. Sansa giggled, as much out of sheer joy as out of fright, and touched the crystal's neighbor. This produced several spinning diamond rainbows, and Sansa laughed again, this time from pure delight.

"I told you they'd look prettier from up here!" Arya's voice sounded from a bronze chandelier in the corner, where she had perched next to a falcon's head. Sansa barely heard her, but she did notice the triangular crystals hanging from the fixture's branches. That design, she thought, would look lovely sewn in dark gold thread onto the green Valentino dress Mother had just ordered for her to wear at Robb's upcoming thirteenth birthday celebration. She took a few deep breaths, then swung downward. She felt a peculiar rush of excitement as she did so, and felt a dizzy whoop escape her lungs as she propelled her legs to the top of a nearby dresser. Several locks of her long red hair, which had escaped her braid, fell in front of her face as she moved, and she swept them aside before taking another deep breath and launching herself through the air to grab onto an arm of the sturdy stag chandelier.

"Sansa!" Arya's voice sounded from across the room, where she was now swinging upside-down from a golden chandelier adorned with lions and sharp, dagger-like crystals. "Catch me!"

Sansa rolled her eyes. "Catch _me_ ," she shot back, and swung herself upward to sit on top of her own chandelier and inspect the crystals. Only a few minutes later, she felt a jolt, and the chandelier began to spin with the force of Arya's arrival. Sansa's body was jarred downward, and all she could do other than scream was to catch her fall with her knees, swing perilously upside-down, and grab onto the next arm for dear life as the chandelier stabilized.

Once the spinning stopped, the breath Sansa had been holding onto as tightly as she had grasped the chandelier came out in gasps, which turned into giggles as she saw the faces Arya was making at her.

"Arya," she said, but the scolding had gone out of her voice.

"See how much fun it is?" The younger girl, still hanging like a Dornish orangutan directly across from Sansa, began giggling herself. "Let's make it spin again!"

She swung herself forward, and this time Sansa, much more prepared and now accustomed to the feeling of swinging through the air, replicated her sister's action. Soon both girls' shrieks of joy echoed across the room. For over an hour they swung from chandelier to chandelier, giggling until the chains rattled and the crystals shook and the room turned into a dizzying blur of rippling lights.

Finally, even Arya grew exhausted, and she and Sansa swung off the chandeliers and clambered back onto the glimmering gray stone floor. They squeezed back through the doorway and into the hall, which was as empty as Arya had said it would be.

"How did you find it?" Sansa finally asked her sister as they made their way back toward their bedrooms. "Did Robb show you?"

Arya shook her head. "No, silly, I found it myself. I haven't told Robb about it. Or Bran," she added hastily.

At the thought of their three-year-old younger brother trying to climb the furniture in the chandelier room, Sansa shot her sister the sternest look she could muster. "Arya Stark, if you show Bran that room before he reaches your age, I'll ask the Mother herself to – "

"Of course I won't," replied Arya. "I won't even tell Robb. Although it would be really fun to tell him he swings like a girl. Too bad he's got to go to the boarding school next term and act like a fine, proper prince. He's not as proper as you."

Sansa pursed her lips, but only for a moment. "Robb is already a fine prince," she replied. "Besides, he doesn't have to be completely proper until he finishes his university years and Father and Mother find him a bride with the Marriage Pact. And even after that, he won't be king for a very long time."

Arya made a face. "I wouldn't ever follow the Marriage Pact," she said firmly. "You and Robb can follow it all you like, but when I'm done with university I'm going to become a pilot and fly to – "

"Essos, and make movies of the desert for _International Explorer_ ," Sansa finished with her. It had become the new profession of Arya's choice ever since their uncle, Prince Benjen Stark, had given her a set of DVD documentaries about Essos produced by the most famous science publication in the known world.

Both sisters grinned. It was nice, thought Sansa, not to be fighting with Arya for a change. And it was very nice that Arya had shared something with Sansa that she had not first talked about with Robb or one of her friends.

Arya's grin widened. "We should do this again tomorrow," she said.

"The servants will be cleaning it tomorrow, Arya," Sansa reminded her, "and after that they'll open it back up until next year's cleaning."

"Fine." Arya sighed. "Next year, then."

Another smile crept onto Sansa's face. "Maybe," she said, then, "All right, then, yes. But you can't tell Robb, and you can't tell Bran."

Arya grinned. "I promise," she said, and Sansa's smile widened to match hers.

"All right," she said, and turned to the door leading to her quarters. "Now I have to sketch all of the chandeliers before I forget how they look. And," she added after a moment, "once Robb follows the Marriage Pact and his wife has babies, I won't have to follow the Marriage Pact either, and I will design all of my own dresses and marry whichever of the princes I like."

Arya rolled her eyes, but only a little. "You can get married, then," she replied, "but I'd rather be like Uncle Benjen and never get married and be a pilot wherever I like."

The faint sound of Sansa's vintage turquoise alarm clock streamed into the hallway from her bedroom.

"Dinnertime!" Arya's eyes lit up.

" _Almost_ dinnertime," Sansa corrected her, smiling patiently. "We still have fifteen minutes."

Arya moaned. "Ugh. I'll starve."

Sansa's smile expanded into a grin, although she could feel her own stomach growling. "You shouldn't have swung on the chandeliers and made yourself so hungry, then," she teased.

"Girls!" Queen Catelyn Tully's voice drifted toward them from around the corner at the end of the hall, and seconds later the queen herself appeared, white shirt sleeves rolled up and a tan suit coat matching her elegant pencil skirt slung over her elbow.

"You're early," Arya said, grinning, once the queen had kissed both of her daughters.

Queen Catelyn smiled back. "I finished my last meeting early," she replied. "I told the Mayor of Wintertown that your father and I wanted a full evening with our children. Besides, the maesters say that the Northern Lights are coming out tonight, so we are going to take you to the top of the North Tower to see them after dark."

Both girls' jaws dropped. The Northern Lights appeared in the sky over Winterfell perhaps once every ten years, and had last appeared when Sansa had been a baby and Robb but three years old. They were said to be a marvelous sight, and on occasion the three oldest Stark siblings would look up pictures and video clips of them on the Internet to stoke their imaginations about how the sky might look during the lights' actual appearance.

"Really? Tonight?" Arya's eager voice interrupted Sansa's reverie once again.

"Yes, tonight," her mother replied, beaming at her younger daughter. "How would you like having some Volantine hot chocolate while you watch?"

Sansa's eyes opened until they were almost as big as the round crystals hanging from the big copper chandelier. Mother and Father only allowed them to drink the special hot chocolate from Volantis on their birthdays and on Founding Day at the start of each year. She and Arya, who was speechless for once, could only nod.

"All right," said the queen, and turned to give her younger daughter a half-exasperated look. "Arya Stark, your hair needs to be re-braided. And no pouting," she added, putting her hand on the girl's shoulder. "You needn't ask Miss Jeyne. I'll do it myself." She turned to Sansa. "And then yours, Sansa, if you like."

Sansa's eyes lit up. "Oh, yes, please," she agreed. Usually her own maid brushed and braided her hair every morning, and then before dinner if she needed it; and of late, she had tried to arrange it herself on occasion. It was a rare treat to have Mother brush her hair any more other than a few evenings a week, right before bed.

Sansa skipped into her chamber, forgetting that that was not how a proper lady traveled about a castle, and changed as fast as she could into a brown sweater dress for dinner. She pulled out her sketchbook and had drawn two of the ten chandeliers before her mother entered the room.

"How was your day, my Sansa?" she asked as two of Sansa's maids pushed a cushioned chair to sit directly behind Sansa's favorite easy chair in front of the fireplace.

Sansa beamed. "It was lovely," she said, handing her hairbrush to her mother. "Very lovely."


End file.
